jQuery Forum

It's not really anything to do with jQuery (other than any influence jQuery's authors might have had on the draft recommendation), since browsers that support the Selectors API will return whatever that returns and jQuery is (probably) complying for browsers that don't implement it.

Selectors are supposed to ignore text nodes for child selectors according to the Selectors Level 3 draft (which is also used by CSS):



Why do you want to remove all the trailing BRs? They don't take up any space in the layout unless there is something other than whitespace after them. A simple function to remove them is:

1. function clearBRs() {
     var br, brs = document.getElementsByTagName('br');
     var i = brs.length;
   
     while (i--) {
       br = brs[i];
       if (!br.nextSibling) {
         br.parentNode.removeChild(br);
       }
     }
   }